Hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor have announced support for Bitcoin Gold, making them one of the few major platforms to commit to the fledgling fork. While Trezor integration is good news for BTG, it illustrates the lack of mainstream vendors who’ve pledged to accept the new digital currency.
See also: Bitcoin Gold’s Confusing Mainnet Launch Has a Rough Start
Bitcoin Gold Finds a New Home
The birth of bitcoin gold has been largely overlooked amidst the bitcoin and bitcoin cash dramas ongoing, with few mainstream platforms committing support for BTG so far. Although BTG futures trading soared over the weekend, amidst bitcoin cash reaching record highs, by the time the bitcoin gold mainnet went live on Sunday, the excitement had dissipated.
As news.Bitcoin.com reported, BTG got off to a rocky start with talk of a chain split, but the network has since stabilized. Trezor’s announcement that BTC holders prior to the fork will soon be able to claim bitcoin gold spells good news for the nascent cryptocurrency. If it is to attain widespread adoption within the crypto community, it requires support from as many platforms as possible.
Low Support and Low Volume
Thus far, BTG has been limited to a handful of major exchanges including Bitfinex, HitBTC, and YoBit, though the total number of exchanges where bitcoin gold is available runs to 18. It is also now supported by half a dozen wallet providers. Inevitable comparisons have been made between bitcoin gold and bitcoin cash, which got off to a far more auspicious start when it debuted back in August.
Following initial recalcitrance from some exchanges, most platforms eventually disbursed bitcoin cash to BTC holders, and wallet developers swiftly added support. This time around, there was less fanfare surrounding another bitcoin fork due to a multitude of factors, including lack of promotion and concerns over the size of the pre-mine that was carried out to fund ongoing development.
Once Trezor customers make BTG available to their customers it will be interesting to see whether the coin is held or dumped. Despite suffering a few teething problems upon launch, these are early days for the bitcoin gold team, who have big plans for their BTC spin-off, whose proprietary features include mining difficulty adjustment with every block. Should the debates over bitcoin mining centralization ramp up, bitcoin gold, with its GPU algorithm, may emerge to stake a claim for being a more decentralized bitcoin.
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